SOURCE: “Shakespeare Rewriting Ovid: Olivia's Interview with Viola and the Narcissus Myth,” in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 50, 1997, pp. 81-89.

[In the following essay, Taylor details Shakespeare's reshaping of the Narcissus myth from Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Olivia-Viola-Orsino relationship of Twelfth Night.]

The writer is always a rewriter, the problem then being to differentiate and authenticate the rewriting. This is executed not by the addition of something wholly new, but by the dismembering and reconstruction of what has already been written.

(Terence Cave on creative imitation of the classics in the sixteenth century)¹

When Orsino sends her to Olivia with his latest message of love, Viola sees little hope of success for,

If she be so abandoned to her sorrow
As it is spoke, she never will admit me.

(1.4.19-20)

Still grief stricken after nearly a year, the young Countess has only recently announced her intention to continue in mournful seclusion for a further seven years;² and it is public knowledge that she has also solemnly forsworn any romantic attachment. And yet it takes only a brief display of obstinacy before Viola is admitted, Olivia explaining that hearing of her spirited responses to Malvolio, she has ‘allowed your approach rather to wonder at you than to hear you’ (1.5.189-91). She has no interest in the message, then, but the messenger is being entertained because ‘he’ promises to be a diverting curiosity. Yet if Olivia were still ‘so abandoned to her sorrow / As it is spoke’, the interview would not take place at all. And even if one ignores the incongruity of a ‘fair young man’ being admitted to the presence of one who has ‘abjured the sight / And company of men’ (1.2.36-7), here is a young woman, having just publicly announced that she is shutting herself away from the world to spend the foreseeable future weeping and mourning, ready to avail herself of casual diversion.

The evidence indicates that, although she continues to display all the external trappings, Olivia's grief has run its course, and that by the time the play opens, for all the public pronouncements, she is simply a bored young woman with time on her hands. Like others in Illyria where appearance and reality are constantly confused and ‘Nothing that is so, is so’ (4.1.8), the young Countess is not what she seems. And in a dramatic world where it is not until the anagnorisis that ‘the glass seems true’ (5.1.263), her appearance as the eternally grieving sister is one more ‘untrue’ image. It is a reminder, too, that, although she may create the impression of maturity with her presence and the command she exercises over her household, Olivia is still, as E. S. Donno, the New Cambridge editor, has reminded us, ‘very young indeed’.³ Both the public extension of her mourning and her going to the extreme lengths of forswearing all men, for example, smack of the impractical idealism of the young, and also have more than a hint of the histrionics in which even the more sensible young ladies of her age sometimes indulge. But her behaviour goes deeper than youthful whimsy: basically, it stems from a lack of interest in and complete indifference to the outside world and a wish not to be bothered by it. As virginal figures on the fringes of life sometimes do, the elegant young Countess, who is comfortable in her reclusive life-style, sees no reason to emerge into the world and suffer its complications and entanglements. Consequently, in a household where time hangs heavy, the young mistress is yet another victim of the ‘lethargy’ that afflicts various other members in one form or another. And as she languidly allows her life to drift into sterile emptiness, excuses made earlier when Viola was still at the gate, that Olivia was ‘sick’ or ‘asleep’ (1.5.134 and 136), carry far more truth than was intended.

The interview which fundamentally transforms her outlook, ‘curing’ and ‘awakening’ her to life, is a key moment in the play. It is also a very remarkable and rare example of the ‘language of imitation’ in Shakespeare, a reminder that imitation of classical texts could be a rich linguistic resource for sixteenth-century writers. The only comparable imitation in the dramatist's work is Prospero's invocation (‘Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves’ The Tempest 5.1.33ff.) where with superb inventiveness and consummate skill, he closely follows Ovid's Medea speech (‘montesque amnesque lacusque / Dique omnes nemorum’ Metamorphoses vii.197ff.).⁴ The interview, too, is based on an Ovidian text, the Narcissus myth which with its confusion of appearance and reality and ambience of lethargy has long been recognized as having relevance to the play.⁵ But it is imitation of a different order, a carefully crafted and substantial example of ‘creative imitation’ of a classical text as it was known and practised in the Renaissance.⁶ Accordingly, focusing throughout on Metamorphoses iii.339-510, Shakespeare disassembles Ovid's text and, carefully shaping and adapting its various parts to the dramatic circumstances, brilliantly reconstructs it to serve his own purposes.

I

A feature of the myths of the innocents in the Metamorphoses who also shun love and languidly turn away from the world is the comparison of their beauty to a work of art. Ovid uses this motif ironically, placing it just as they lose their picturesque composure and their lives are thrown into confusion by the advent of passion. Hermaphroditus, for example, is compared to carved ivory figures or lilies preserved in glass as he enters the waters of Salmacis' pool where his world will be shattered (iv.354-5). And Narcissus is compared to a statue of Parian marble as he lies by the pool and sees the non-existent ‘boy’ who is to inflame and totally confuse him (iii.418-19). The interview where passion first enters the life of Shakespeare's own beautiful young recluse, throwing her into confusion and inflaming her, too, with ardent desire for a non-existent ‘boy’, begins with a variation on Ovid's motif and the Narcissus image. At Viola's request, Olivia removes her veil and, as she does, compares herself to a painting: ‘we will draw the curtain and show you the picture’ (1.5.223). The variation from statue to painting which is more in accord with immediate circumstances, may have been suggested by details of Golding's translation of the Parian marble simile which, as we see below, was in Shakespeare's mind at this point.

Although Olivia's self-comparison is accompanied by a sardonic question, ‘Is't not well done?’, her words remind us that the young Countess has her share of vanity; they also unintentionally throw into relief the stillness and inertia of her life. And confronted by Olivia's ‘picture’, Viola, who has had to bear her own share of grief and hardship, and yet remains ‘fresh and quick’ with love, is provoked into a courteous but not unsympathetic reprimand:

'Tis beauty truly blent,
whose red and white
Nature's own sweet and cunning hand
laid on.
Lady, you are the cruell'st she alive
If you will lead these graces to
the grave
And leave the world no copy.

(1.5.228-32: italics mine)

Direct and indirect echoes of Narcissus thread this speech. With its image of the red and white of Olivia's complexion skilfully mixed (‘truly blent’) as if they were paints, together with the reference moments later to Olivia's lips as ‘indifferent red’ (236), and the subsequent reference in the speech to physical gifts as ‘graces’, the first line echoes Golding's translation of the mythical boy lying by the pool ‘like an ymage made of Marble stone’ (3.523), and gazing upon:

                                                  the perfect grace
Of white and red indifferently bepainted in
his face.

(3.529-30: italics mine)⁷

‘Nature's own sweet and cunning hand’ is also taken from Golding, but this time from the translator's version of the Pythagorean Sermon where the picture of man's brief span begins when ‘Dame Nature’ releases him from the womb at birth with ‘conning hand’ (15.240).⁸ And this description of the brevity of human life leads directly into the great classical caveat on woman's vanity, the haunting image of the aged Helen who, as she awaits ‘lingring death’:

                                                  when shee saw her aged wrincles in
A glasse, wept also: musing in herself what men
had seen

(15.255-6)⁹

Even before his heroine actually begins her polite censure of Olivia for leading ‘graces to the grave’ in line three of the speech, then, the dramatist's thoughts are on Narcissus, child-birth, vanity, and ‘tyme the eater up of things’. And the brief censure when it is delivered, recalls moments involving narcissistic figures from two of Shakespeare's other works. The burden of Viola's argument, and details like leaving the world a ‘copy’ of one's beauty, recall the repeated appeals to the ‘lovely boy’ of the Sonnets. And also echoing in the background as Viola politely censures Olivia's ‘picture’, is a far more outspoken rebuke of another figure who also scorned love and involvement, Adonis:

Fie, lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone,
Well painted idol, image dull and dead,
Statue contenting but the eye alone

(Venus and Adonis 211-14)

The context in which Ovid's motif is set, as Shakespeare adapts the first element of the myth, sees a resumption of an old argument between the two great writers. Ovid's comparison of Narcissus' youthful beauty to a work of art stems from his belief that only art had permanence in an ever-changing world;¹⁰ the implication is that if the boy had indeed been a work of art, his beauty would have survived instead of simply wasting away. But Olivia's self-comparison to a painting, and Viola's critical response, show once again how little Shakespeare cared for Ovid's aesthetic creed. Equally concerned for the plight of frail beauty amid the ‘wastes of time’, his firm view was, as is shown by the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, and perhaps most splendidly by the magnificent resurrection of Hermione in The Winter's Tale, that it is in ‘warm life’ that salvation lies, not in any ‘poor image’ or ‘cold stone’, or ‘curtained’ ‘oily painting’ (see 5.3.35ff.). And through Viola, he is here underscoring his conviction that it is in a child, a living ‘copy’ of the individual, that beauty survives. What is needed, it is implied, is not a retreat from ‘all complexities of mire or blood’ into man-made art, but a commitment to life and a meaningful use of God's ‘graces’. Having already implicitly reminded Olivia that ‘God did all’, Viola is arguing that Olivia should not bury her heaven-sent gifts ‘in the earth’ as the ‘slouthful’ servant did in the Parable of Talents (see Matthew 25.25 and 26), but use them before it is too late.

The interview now appropriates a second element of the Narcissus myth and probably its most celebrated feature, the catalogue of the boy's beauty. As he gazes into the mirror of his pool, Narcissus surveys his eyes, cheeks, neck, and complexion, Ovid concluding that ‘he admires all the things for which he himself was admired’ (‘Cunctaque miratur, quibus est mirabilis ipse’ iii.424). And Olivia, who, as we have seen, has her share of vanity, now brushes aside Viola's argument to present a catalogue of her own beautiful features. In contrast to the myth, however, Olivia's catalogue has an immediate air of death about it; fastening on the reference to the ‘grave’, she ‘labels’ her beauty as if composing a ‘will’:

O sir, I will not be so hard-hearted. I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried and every particle and utensil labelled to my will, as item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth.

(233-7)

To her own mind, she is languidly indulging in witty repartee; but it is as she is ironically and ominously ‘tombing’ her own ‘unused beauty’, just as the narcissistic boy of Sonnet 7 threatened to do, that Viola realizes why she cannot love:

I see you what you are, you are too proud

(239)

It is the culmination of the subtextual imagery linking Olivia and Narcissus for, as D. J. Palmer has pointed out in an influential article, it identifies the young Countess with the mythical boy.¹¹ Narcissus turned away from the world and shunned love because ‘his delicate beauty was mixed with unyielding pride’ (‘in tenera tam dura superbia forma’ iii.354), and Olivia's ‘most radiant, exquisite, and unmatchable beauty’ (163) is similarly infected. Hence, like Narcissus, who realized too late that ‘plenty has made me poor’ (‘inopem me copia fecit’ 466), she, too, to use the words of the Sonnets, is making ‘a famine where abundance lies’ (1.7). Moreover, although she cloaks her vanity in sardonic humour, to this point in the interview, in the elegant, lethargic setting of the household which is her retreat, her eyes, like the boy's in his refined, languid locus amoenus, have been on her own image.¹²

II

One now becomes aware of the extent of Shakespeare's imitation of Ovid's myth for at this point Viola becomes Echo to Olivia's Narcissus.¹³ Just as Ovid's nymph echoed words of love to the disdainful boy in an attempt to persuade him to love, so does Viola to the disdainful Countess. Initially, when asked how Orsino loves Olivia, she echoes her master; like Echo, ‘she reports words she has heard’ (‘audita … verba reportat’ 369). The accents of Orsino's clichéd yet somehow intensely passionate speech sound through as she tells Olivia that her master loves her ‘With adorations, fertile tears, / With groans that thunder love, with sighs of fire’ (244-5). And then when asked what she would do, becoming even more like Ovid's nymph, she echoes her own frustration in love:

Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house,
Write loyal cantons of contemnèd love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out ‘Olivia!’ O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth
But you should pity me.

(257-65)

As she reveals love as a passionate, urgent power, set ‘Between the elements of air and earth’ and driving those it afflicts into a restless pursuit of its goal, her message is that of her mythical counterpart—‘let us meet’ (‘coeamus’ iii.387).¹⁴ But ironically, like Echo, Viola is only a voice, ‘calling’, ‘singing’, ‘hallooing’, and making the nymph herself, ‘the babbling gossip of the air’, ‘cry out’, and the hills ‘reverberate’ with hopeless love. And the loved one, Olivia, who is pictured as having the absolute power that Echo gave to Narcissus (‘sit tibi copia nostri’ (‘I am yours to command’) iii.392), is like the legendary boy, isolated by pride in a shadowy, world.

At the very beginning of the interview, as they first engage in conversation, Viola and Olivia make reference to the ‘divinity’ of love, its ‘profanation’ by the incognoscenti, the lover's suit as ‘doctrine’ contained in the ‘chapters’ of his ‘bosom’, and his insincerity as ‘heresy’ (1.5.209-19). In polite, aristocratic circles, such pseudo-religious terminology was conventional and gave what were often casual liaisons the appearance of great substance.¹⁵ But Shakespeare is not content with such clichéd romantic language for long and it suddenly deepens into actual religious terminology with ‘God doing all’ as the Creator and endowing men with ‘graces’. A similar depth is imparted to trite, conventional language in Viola's speech where the tormented, sleepless lover, his anguished state symbolized by the willow, serenades his disdainful lady through the night in the hope that she might ‘pity’ him.¹⁶ But this time cliché is not suddenly transformed; it is infused with genius from the first. However, amid the speech's passionate and beautiful lyricism, there is one particularly arresting phrase, ‘my soul within the house’. Apparently sounding a beautiful but merely lyric note, this relates the speech via a religious image to the play's central themes of sterility and fruitfulness. It recalls the magnificent Pauline image of the ‘soul’ within the ‘earthly house’ of the body from 2 Corinthians 5, an epistle which warns that men should not ‘rejoice in the face’ (12) and ‘live unto themselves’ (15) but seek a renewal of their life. In a way that is characteristic of his eristic approach to the Roman poet, Shakespeare is thus both using and going beyond Ovid and continuing to invest his imitation of the latter's pagan myth of physical beauty with profound spiritual undertones.

The speech proves the turning point of the interview. Brief and hypothetical though it is, it has apparently offered Olivia the novel prospect of herself as an object of real desire; and this does more for her than any amount of reasoning has been able to do for suddenly, all opposition forgotten, she falls in love. The irony, of course, is that the feelings expressed in the speech have nothing to do with her; they are no more than an echo of Viola's passionate but frustrated love for Orsino.¹⁷ But the end result is that Olivia becomes even more like Narcissus; for her, as for her mythical counterpart, it is now a case of ‘a sweet boy beloved in vain’ (‘Heu frustra dilecte puer’ iii.500) and of ‘gazing insatiably on a beautiful, deceiving form’ (‘Spectat inexpleto mendacem lumine formam’ 439).

Ovid had opened the Narcissus myth with a witty parody of the words of the Delphic Oracle in Tiresias' prophecy that the boy would come to maturity ‘only if he did not know himself’ (‘si se non noverit’ 348). And Shakespeare, again bridling at negative elements in Ovid, concludes the interview by reversing this opening motif. Hearing Viola, Olivia has at last come to know herself, and finally been awakened to the depths and needs of her own nature. For this Narcissus figure self-knowledge will be the key to the ripeness her Ovidian counterpart never reached. And the process begins as Olivia falls in love with the deceptive form of the ‘boy’ before her: for her, in contrast to Ovid's Narcissus, the advent of passion does not mark the beginning of a slow decline toward death but of a renewal of her appetite for life. No longer will her richness make her poor, and in a very different sense to the Narcissus of the Metamorphoses, Olivia has been brought to the realization that ‘what I seek is in myself’ (‘Quod cupio, mecum est’ 466). She therefore becomes most like Narcissus in the very moment that she is most unlike him and the lethargic spell is broken. She herself now realizes that she should not ‘rest’ between ‘the elements of air and earth’ and, having been confronted by the illusion of love, her life is to resolve into an urgent pursuit of its reality,¹⁸ a pursuit in which, although often frantic and undignified, she is to be refreshingly free from concern for self and able to express the innate richness and generosity of her nature.

Of his own borrowings from classical literature, John Donne wrote, ‘If I doe borrow any thing of Antiquitie, besides that I make account that I pay it to posterity, with as much and as good: You shall still finde mee to acknowledge it, and to thanke … him … that hath digg'd out treasure for mee.’¹⁹ Shakespeare was of a like mind for he now closes the interview by tacitly and gracefully acknowledging his debt to Ovid and the Narcissus myth as both women closely echo the Latin text. Viola leaves with the wish that Olivia one day endure what her master endures:

Love make his heart of flint that you shall love,
And let your fervour, like my master's be
Placed in contempt.

(276-8)

This recalls the prayer to Nemesis of one of Narcissus' suitors who is placed in contempt (‘despectus’ iii.404)—‘So may he love and be reduced to despair’ (‘sic amet ipse licet, sic non potiatur amato’ 405). And moments after Viola has left, Olivia declares:

Methinks I feel this youth's perfections
With an invisible and subtle stealth
To creep in at mine eyes.

(286-8)

which echoes the moment Narcissus is ‘silently overcome by the sight of the beautiful image before him’ (‘visae correptus imagine formae’ 416).

From the impact of Erasmus analysing the problems of emulation and the preservation of the writer's own identity when imitating the classics in works such as Ciceronianus, right down to the schoolroom where masters like William Kempe instructed boys to imitate ‘Tullyes Epistles’ ‘altered with many varieties at once’,²⁰ creative imitation of specific classical texts was as central to Humanist culture in England as it was elsewhere in sixteenth-century Europe. And as two excellent recent studies remind us, creative imitation was often positively discordant: in his seminal and wide-ranging study of imitation in Renaissance poetry in Europe, Thomas Greene refers to a special category he calls ‘dialectical’ imitation which is based on an awareness of the ‘incompleteness’ of the classical subtext;²¹ while in his examination of the problems of writing in the French Renaissance, Terence Cave defines all imitation of the classics as ‘a kind of intertextual dialogue or conflict’.²² It is against such a backcloth that Shakespeare's contentious imitation of Ovid's myth should be seen. As he rewrites Ovid's text in a radical fashion, making the self-knowledge motif the conclusion instead of introduction, and rearranging its various parts so that it becomes life-affirming rather than life-denying, one's eye is inevitably taken by the ongoing arguments with his favourite classical poet; but the real importance of this fractious imitation of Ovid is its function within the overall context of the play.

When Viola arrives in Illyria and proposes assuming disguise as Orsino's ‘eunuch’ (1.2.52), she is doing no more than unwittingly adapt herself to an environment which is sterile and in which ‘Nothing that is so, is so.’ The tone is set in Illyria by Orsino and Olivia who both seem to be what they are not and who both have adopted barren life-styles. Apparently engaged in society, the one observing the rituals of courtship, the other those of mourning, in reality, both have turned away from the world and retreated into themselves to live a life of self-centred and barren seclusion. Moreover, in their elegant retreats, both are bemused by shadows for like the mythical boy, they dwell, in their different ways, on their own images and reflexions. When the inner sanctum of Olivia's world is penetrated, as we have seen, beneath the dark mourning veil is a beautiful, young victim of arid self-fixation. And Orsino suffers, albeit in a less obvious way, from the same condition. The ‘image of the creature / That is beloved’ (2.4.18-19) which he spends hours contemplating when ‘canopied with bowers’, is carefully modelled after his own constant and idealistic nature. It has long been recognized that the noble duke is in love with an idea of love but the extent to which that idea is a subtle projection of his own image has, perhaps, been insufficiently appreciated. And, like the mythical boy in his fascination with this ‘shadow’ of love, he is careful to preserve his isolation, fearing exposure to the real world would show him what Narcissus secretly knew was true, that ‘what you seek is nowhere’ (‘quod petis est nusquam’ iii.433).²³ Finally, the play's preoccupation with the theme of narcissism is underscored by the presence in the sub-plot of Malvolio, patently ‘sick of self-love’ (1.5.86) and periodically retiring to the seclusion of the garden to practise his ‘behaviour to his own shadow’ (2.5.16). Where the steward is different is that in his case, there is an absence of any sense of rich gifts being wasted; a pastiche of Narcissus, he possesses comparative pride and vanity but is conspicuously lacking in the grace and personal beauty that went some way towards explaining the boy's fascination with himself.

For Orsino and Olivia, the play is a movement from shadow into sunlight, from the confusion of an unreal world where they are ‘jaded’ by uncertain and deceptive ‘images’, ‘dreams’, and ‘fancies’, into the reality of a ‘daylight’ world where confusion dissolves and ‘appearances seem true’. The action turns on the exposure of their narcissism. As she does with Olivia, Viola holds a mirror up to Orsino, making him aware of his stagnant life-style; the turning point is again a key speech, in this case—‘She sat like patience on a monument’ (2.4.114). Consequently, responding to the promptings of love, he, too, awakens to life, dispenses with shadows and emerges into the real world to claim Viola's hand and take his place in the community. For Olivia, exposure and release come, of course, with the interview, the moment when, freed from the confines of the imagination, she begins to change from a proud, vain, self-centred girl into a mature and giving woman. Her progress to reality, which is reflected in a newly discovered sense of time (‘The clock upbraids me with the waste of time’ 3.1.129), is to culminate in union with Sebastian and the appearance of ‘the glorious sun’ (4.3.1). For Malvolio the movement of the main plot is reversed; he moves from shadow into darkness, from confusion into madness. The box-tree scene shows his foolishness can only be exposed to others: he himself is so encased by pride and vanity in his private world that he is totally incapable of realising it. Predictably finding his own image in the ‘mirror’ of Maria's letter, he just as predictably plunges even deeper into self-fixation and egocentric fantasy. Because of his overweening philautia and a spiteful, mean nature that is incapable of love, it is his lot to remain in isolation mocked and driven to madness by uncertain shadows. He stands as a powerful warning against what Orsino and Olivia have escaped: the ultimate consequences of self-centred absorption into ‘the world of the imagination’ and the mockery and torment that comes with subjection to ‘its inconstant shapes’.²⁴

Notes

1. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 76. I am indebted in this article, as in so much of my work, to the wise counsel of Michael Quinn of University College, Cardiff.

2. Shakespeare may have in mind the Bible where seven years is traditionally the period of famine (see, for example, Genesis 41.30). In courtly literature like The Adventures of F.J., seven years is also used to signify ‘the flower’ of a woman's youth. (Reference is to The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed. J. W. Cunliffe in 2 vols (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1907), vol. 1, p. 430; and The Geneva Bible ed. L. E. Berry (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1969)).

3. Twelfth Night (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 8.

4. Reference is to a standard sixteenth-century edition of Ovid's poem containing the notes of Regius and Micyllus, Metamorphoseon Pub, Ovidii Nasonis (Venice, 1545).

5. For important recent considerations of the Narcissus myth and the play, see D. J. Palmer, ‘Twelfth Night and The Myth of Echo and Narcissus’, Shakespeare Survey 32 (1979), pp. 73-8; William C. Carroll, The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 80ff.; and Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 148-51. Although the eclectic approach to myth fashionable in the sixteenth-century saw a wide variety of traditions associated with Narcissus, the Elizabethans would know that the myth had particular relevance to Illyria's ‘lethargy’. When they first met Ovid's myth in the grammar school, for example, they used Natalis Comes's Mythologiae, and while he recounts various other traditions associated with the boy, Comes gives prominence to that identifying him with ‘inactivity’ and ‘sluggishness; (‘torpor’). (See Mythologiae, ed. S. Orgel (London and New York, Garland Publishing Inc., 1976), p. 285r; for the use of Comes in the grammar school, see T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke 2 vols. (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1944), vol. 1, pp. 421 and 436. In Narcissus and the Invention of Personal History (London and New York, Garland Publishing Inc., 1985), where he traces the traditions linked to Narcissus through the ages, Kenneth Knoespel shows the association of the boy with ‘torpor’ goes back to Ancient Greece and ‘an etymological link between the Greek words narcissus and narcotic’ (p. 3)).

6. On imitation in the Renaissance, see Terence Cave, The Comucopian Text and Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1982).

7. Golding is translating ‘decusque / Oris, & in niveo mixtum candore ruborem’ (iii.422-3).

   (Reference to Golding is to The xv Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into English meeter, by Arthur Golding Gentleman (London, 1567), ed. W. H. D. Rouse (London, 1904, rpt. Centaur Press, 1961).)

8. Ovid had written that ‘Nature moved cunning hands’ (‘Artifices natura manus admovit …’ xv.218) which Golding translates as ‘Dame Nature put too cooning hand’ (15.240).

   (It is the Christian colouring the Calvinistic Golding repeatedly gave to his translation that explains why Shakespeare chose to recall it rather than the original in Viola's speech. For this recurrent but spasmodic feature of his work, see my analysis of the Pythagorean Sermon in ‘Melting Earth and Leaping Bulls: Shakespeare's Ovid and Arthur Golding’, Connotations 4 (1994/5), 192-206).

9. The Latin text reads:

   Flet quoque, ut in speculo rugas adspexit aniles,
   Tyndaris et secum cur sit bis rapta requirit.

   (xv.232-3)

10. It is Ovid's proud claim at the poem's conclusion, for instance, that his own ‘art’ (‘opus’) will survive ‘the anger of Jove, war, fire, and the ravages of time’ (‘Iovis ira … ignis … ferrum … edax vetustas’ xv.871-2).

11. ‘Twelfth Night and The Myth of Echo and Narcissus’, p. 74.

    (It is also evocative that as Olivia emerges as a Narcissus figure, Viola continues: ‘But if you were the devil, you are fair’ (240). Amid the cluster of traditions associated with the mythical boy, the Elizabethans would have known the medieval associations of Narcissus with the fallen angels who ‘by reflecting upon themselves, and admiration of their owne excellency, forgot their dependence upon their creator’ (George Sandys, Ovids Metamorphosis englyshed mythologiz'd and Represented in figures (London, 1632), p. 106).

12. This lends considerable irony to her statement that she has granted the interview ‘to wonder at’ Viola. To this point, in her girlish vanity, it is not Viola that she has ‘wondered at’ but herself.

13. Her general affinity to Ovid's retiring nymph in the play has been the subject of much discussion: recently, for example, Jonathan Bate considers that in the role of Echo, Viola ‘redeems the play’ (see Shakespeare and Ovid, pp. 149ff.).

14. As Raphael Regius reminds us with his annotation on this word, besides being a request to meet, it also carried a sense of physical desire and meant ‘let us lie down together, copulate’ (‘Coire … & convenire & concumbere significat’).

15. The religious language of love in aristocratic affairs can be briefly illustrated by The Adventures of Master F.J.: rising early because of his longing for his mistress, for example, F.J. is a ‘knight’ at ‘Morrow Masse’ serving his ‘Saint with double devotion’ (401), and when she later attends his sickbed, his mistress ‘bedewed his temples with sweete water’ saying ‘Good servaunt be whoale’ (426-7).

16. Again cf. The Adventures of F.J. where the willow is repeatedly used as a symbol of the suffering rejection can bring (see 418 and 421), and where, when his lady disdains him, F.J. writes a poem ‘to plead for pitie’ (450).

17. It is symptomatic of the general malaise prevailing in the aptly named country of Illyria that a thorough corruption of language takes place. Both Viola's great speeches on love, to Olivia and to Orsino (2.4.110ff.), for example, have an air of duplicity and mendacity. The difference is that her corruption of language tends to have a healing effect; the corruption of words by others—for example, Orsino's strained interpretation of Olivia's rejection of his suit (1.1.32ff.), Malvolio's tortured gloss on Maria's letter (2.5.84ff.)—merely causes reality to recede.

18. For a stimulating consideration of Spenser's similar investment of the Narcissus myth with Platonic undertones, see Calvin R. Edwards, ‘The Narcissus Myth in Spenser's Poetry’, Studies in Philology 74 (1977), 63-88.

19. Prefatory Epistle to ‘The Progresse of the Soule’, cited by Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy, p. 47.

20. See ‘The Method of Schooling’ in The Education of Children in Learning (London, 1588).

21. Greene, see pp. 45ff.

22. Cave, The Cornucopian Text, p. 36.

23. For discussion of Orsino as a Narcissus figure, see D. J. Palmer, ‘Twelfth Night and The Myth of Echo and Narcissus', 74, and my ‘Narcissus, Olivia, and a Greek Tradition’, Notes and Queries 241 (1997), 58-61.

24. In both this play and A Midsummer Night's Dream, as Jonathan Bate has pointed out in his admirable study, Shakespeare and Ovid, the dramatist is preoccupied with the ‘world of the imagination and its inconstant shapes’ (see pp. 146ff.).